Heart of a Stranger

This study intends to explore the metaphor of exile in women’s writing in English through a variety of texts belonging to different cultural and national contexts and to different literary genres (autobiography, fiction, travel literature and poetry). The protagonists of these texts are committed by vocation to the activity of writing as the main strategy to deal with the exile difficulties in the new environment and mediate the tension between past and present. One of the aim of this study is to look at the various ways in which the opposition of centre and margins and here and elsewhere are faced and deconstructed by a number of twentieth century writers including Anna Kavan, Jean Rhys, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Eva Hoffman, Susan Rubin Suleiman. They represent, within their work, the motifs of the artist as an exile as well as the specific case of the woman writer, and raise questions of language, culture and identity that are recurrent in postcolonial discourse, focussing on such relevant contemporary issues as interculturalism, bilinguism and hybridity.